Santosh Vempala (born 18 October 1971) is a prominent

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public university, public research university and Institute of technology (United States), institute of technology in Atlanta, ...

. His main work has been in the area of

Theoretical Computer Science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

Biography

Vempala secured B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology,

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, but spread chiefly to the west, or beyond its Bank (geography ...

, in 1992 then he attended

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

, where he received his Ph.D. in 1997 under professor Avrim Blum. In 1997, he was awarded a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley. Subsequently, he was a professor at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

in the Mathematics Department, until he moved to Georgia Tech in 2006. In 2024, he and Ben Cousins won the

Fulkerson Prize The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented at e ...

for ''Gaussian cooling and algorithms for volume and Gaussian volume'.''

Work

His main work has been in the area of

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

, with particular activity in the fields of

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

randomized algorithm A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performan ...

s, computational geometry, and

computational learning theory In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms. Overview Theoretical results in machine learning m ...

, including the authorship of books on random projectionS. Vempala, ``The Random Projection Method", American Mathematical Society, 2004. and spectral methods.R. Kannan and S. Vempala,``Spectral Algorithms'', Now Publishers Inc., 2009. In 2008, he co-founded the Computing for Good (C4G) program at Georgia Tech.

Honors and awards

Vempala has received numerous awards, including a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

, Sloan Fellowship, and being listed in Georgia Trend's ''40 under 40''. He was named Fellow of ACM "For contributions to algorithms for convex sets and probability distributions" in 2015. He was named a Fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

, in the 2022 class of fellows, "for contributions to randomized algorithms, high-dimensional geometry, and numerical linear algebra, and service to the profession".

References

External links

Santosh Vempala's home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vempala, Santosh 1971 births Georgia Tech faculty Living people Computer science educators Indian theoretical computer scientists Indian emigrants to the United States Carnegie Mellon University alumni 2015 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Scientists from Visakhapatnam